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It's shortly after 8 a.m. Monday at Sun Peaks Resort and there's a steady stream of youngsters heading to school; riding the magic carpet, packs on their backs, skis or snowboards strapped to their feet.

School here for the 70 or so students from kindergarten through Grade 12 is in two small buildings at the top of the lift that services the resort's beginner slopes. The students - children of families who live year-round in the municipality - regularly achieve high marks in their schooling, delivered by three teachers and the Internet. During breaks and after school they dash outside to put on their skis or boards and get in a few runs.

The growth of Sun Peaks into a municipality and its development into a yearround resort has proven the skeptics were so very wrong when, years ago, they said Tod Mountain and its worldclass steep terrain could not be converted into a familyfriendly resort. Even when Nippon Cable Company Ltd. of Japan purchased the resort in 1992, changed the name to Sun Peaks and prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, skiers and boarders - including those in nearby Kamloops - were not convinced.

"That was for a couple of reasons," says Al Raine, one of the early developers and now mayor of Sun Peaks. "One, it had a reputation for being very cold.

"Second, most of the terrain was very, very steep, a lot of black diamond and double black diamond runs.

"A lot of people in Kamloops who were intermediate skiers would go to ski Silver Star (at Vernon) because this was just too tough for them."

Well, 21 years and about $600 million later, Sun Peaks has become a world-class resort that appeals to skiers and boarders of all skill levels.

With a colourful, efficient, European-style village with ski-to-thelift capability from virtually every building and a variety of non-skiing activities, it is one of Western Canada's most family-friendly resorts.

The resort offers a wide range of non-skiing activities, such as dogsled tours, horse-drawn sleigh rides, tubing, snowmobile tours, snowshoeing and rides in the grooming machine. It has a busy calendar of events ranging from ski and boarding camps to the annual Okanagan wine festival.

The resort also hosts the annual World Cup speed skiing event in February.

But skiing and snowboarding remain the primary draws for visitors, and Sun Peaks has made sure it offers enough variety of terrain to keep every family happy.

"We've done a good job of making sure that off every lift there's novice terrain, there's low-intermediate terrain, there's advancedintermediate terrain and there's the black runs," says Raine, who coached Canada's national ski team to prominence in the 1960s and coached Nancy Greene to her 1968 Olympic gold and silver medals. The two married in 1969. "So it doesn't matter which lift you went on, a family with all different ski levels could all find a run and meet at the bottom," he says.

In Sun Peaks for the annual Sun Peaks Family Cup, Australian Ian Miles, with wife Alison Chivers and sons Riley, 12, Rob, 14, and daughter Remy, 18, said they first came to Sun Peaks in 2013, and enjoyed it so much they returned for a month this winter.

"I think (the kids) will keep coming as long as we keep paying," Miles says, laughing. "Riley loves the terrain park and the jumps, Robbie likes to ski fast and Remy likes to ski powder. So there's something for everybody and a lot of runs here."

Stay and be pampered The village is located near the bottom of those trails, in a valley between three mountain faces that have 11 lifts, 125 runs, nearly 4,000 acres of terrain plus 30 kilometres of groomed and trackset cross-country trails.

The village has nine hotels, a hostel, day lodge, a sports centre, about 15 shopping outlets and more than 20 eateries, offering everything from upper-end dining to cafes and coffee shops.

"The people who work here make the difference between a good resort and a great resort," Raine says over a latte in the Bolacco Café. "It's people like the owners of this place."

Konrad Glowczynski, who came from Poland via Italy, and his wife Elizabeth run one of the busiest eateries in the resort. They offer a variety of superb coffees, lattes, espressos, incredibly delicious pastries that Elizabeth bakes each morning and plenty of breakfast buns and lunch sandwiches.

On top of the food and drinks, the hospitality and friendliness of the staff are fantastic.

Probably no one at the resort is friendlier than Nancy Greene Raine.

Now a sitting senator and an officer of the Order of Canada, Greene Raine won the overall World Cup titles in 1967 and 68 and had 13 World Cup victories (the most by any Canadian skier in history, and still a Canadian record) before retiring at age 24. Named Canadian female athlete of the century in 1999, the now 70-year-old is director of skiing at Sun Peaks and rarely a day goes by when she doesn't hit the slopes and spend hours showing visitors the mountain while offering tips to improve their skiing.

Whether in a lift line, enjoying coffee or a lunch or just standing around, Greene Raine is constantly being approached by strangers who still want to shake her hand and meet one of Canada's bestknown and most successful athletes. Most Sundays she also hosts a welcome reception.

A lot of people in the ski industry raised their eyebrows when Greene Raine and Raine left Whistler after 25 years to move to Sun Peaks in the early 1990s. Just as they were in on the ground floor at Whistler, so too were they at Sun Peaks, where they built the Nancy Greene's Cahilty Lodge, a condo-style hotel.

"To be in Whistler those 25 years when it was just getting started and then moving to Sun Peaks and starting a new one (ski resort development) again, it's really interesting to be part of a pioneer ski resort development," says Greene Raine. "It's different from Whistler in that we're a long way from a major urban city. We have the wonderful city of Kamloops, which is like 80,000 to 100,000 in the trading area. And I'm lucky because the profile I have as an athlete, as an Olympic champion, helps the tourism industry."

John Korobanik was a guest of Tourism Sun Peaks. Tourism Sun Peaks did not review or approve this article.

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